For many years the Edinburgh Fringe Festival has supplied increasing evidence that comedy is on its last legs, and now the winner of this year’s ‘Funniest Joke at the Fringe’ award (sponsored by piss-poor TV channel U&Dave) has confirmed that the age-old art of making each other laugh is stone dead.

Here is the winning joke, by Mark Simmons:
I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship, but I bottled it.

This fails the one and only rule of humour by simply not being funny, boiling down to a lame pun on the slang phrase ‘bottle it’ meaning ‘lose one’s nerve’ (a modification of the informal use of ‘bottle’ to mean ‘courage’) and the dictionary definition of ‘bottle’ as a narrow-necked glass container. I like puns, and frequently concoct them, but at best the word-play might prompt a fleeting grin, rarely a belly-laugh. A pun works best in spontaneous conversation as an amusing display of quick thinking and articulacy, not as part of a stand-up comedian’s routine unless they’re someone like Tim Vine taking it to extremes with a machine-gun onslaught of one-liners. For a stand-alone pun to be funny it’s really got to come into the double entendre/innuendo category and be risqué, vulgar or downright filthy. Who cannot chuckle at the Marie Lloyd (1870-1922) song She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas, at the Mae West (1893-1980) line “I’m a girl who works for Paramount by day and Fox all night”, or at any of the countless hilarious puns Iain Pattinson (1953-2021) cooked up for Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, such as “I want to buy a pie for my wife’s birthday but I can’t decide whether she’d prefer beef in gravy or tongue in cider”?

The other problem with Simmons’ joke is that it has no connection to any reality, given that he has obviously never had any intention of sailing around the globe and there is no such thing as the world’s smallest ship. The gag was entirely contrived to deliver the pun punch-line that feebly depends on the existence of the once popular mantlepiece ornament called a ‘Ship in a Bottle’.

Worse still, the joke’s blatant artificiality is given away by the use of the word ‘globe’ to prevent repetition of its synonym ‘world’. The clumsy outcome delivers ‘around the globe’ rather than the more natural ‘around the world’ because to do it the other way would lead to the even clumsier ‘the globe’s smallest ship’ while other synonyms like ‘planet’ or ‘Earth’ would be even more inappropriate. This means the joke, consisting of a mere 16 words, was actually worked on and carefully constructed – and all to come up with an utterly unfunny, pointless and instantly forgettable dud. Something along the lines of “I intended to drink myself to death, but I bottled it” would at least have been a less forced and less infantile stab at gallows humour. And yet the Edinburgh audiences voted Simmons’ effort the Fringe’s funniest joke! What does that say about the quality of the rest!

It is symptomatic of the collapse of comedy over the last couple of decades. Obediently following the internet era American template of prissy, priggish inoffensiveness, UK comedy has become a bland, censorious, equivocating, trigger-warned bore, exclusively practised by ‘nice’ upper-middle-class narcissists talking about themselves, their so-what ‘neurodiversity’ and the deeply unamusing ups and downs of their smug lives. Had this type of comedy prevailed in the past, many of the greatest comedians would never have worked. WC Fields (1880-1946)? Too cynical, too dissolute. Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)? Too political, too philosophical. Groucho Marx (1890-1977)? Too scathing, too sharp. Max Miller (1894-1963)? Too lewd, too salacious. Frankie Howerd (1917-1992)? Too droll, too rambling. Larry Grayson (1923-1995)? Too seaside postcard, too working-class. Mrs Shufflewick (1924-1983)? Too obscene, too debauched. Lenny Bruce (1925-1966)? Too angry, too leftwing. Les Dawson (1931-1993)? Too gender-specific, too grumpy. Joan Rivers (1933-2014)? Too cruel, too unkind. George Carlin (1937-2008)? Too critical, too brainy. Bill Hicks (1961-1994)? Too ferocious, too truthful. And so on…

Suffice to say, when stand-up has been reduced to not causing any offence to anybody then the very crux of the tragi-comic human condition has been eliminated and the whole purpose of joking itself has been lost. These preposterous, pretentious ‘Fringe’ posers who turn Edinburgh into Airbnb hell every August and delude themselves they are edgy creative artistes with self-aggrandising talk of “playing” venues and performing “sets” don’t seem to realise that what is needed now more than ever as the natural world dies, as the planet is rendered uninhabitable, as Fascism takes hold, and as wars rage across the world, is the merciless ridicule and comprehensive cutting down to size of the human race and all its ignorance, folly and wickedness. WE ARE THE JOKE.

I see that Mr Simmons is from Canterbury, Kent. Now, there’s a potential joke crying out to be worked into a one-liner. Umm…let’s think…how about: what’s the difference between drunken talk over an Indian meal and the Primate of All England? One’s a banter with curry, the other’s a right kent in a beret…

Pictures: Creative Commons; University of Kent (Cartoon Archive)